Republicans get their tech groove on at GOP Tech Summit

The GOP got a rude wake-up call in 2008 when it plainly lagged Democrats in …

Forget necessity: last Friday's inaugural GOP Tech Summit proved that panic is the mother of invention. How else to account for the stunningly rapid convocation—Friday's event at the Republican National Committee headquarters in Washington, DC was only announced Monday—of a pow-wow session that drew activists and e-campaign strategists from around the country, and thousands more via a live webcast, replete with simultaneous online discussion, companion Ning and Facebook groups, and a welter of associated Twitter hashtags?

In the wake of Howard Dean's ill-starred 2004 campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, Dean tech guru Joe Trippi worried "that Dean is the Japanese at Pearl Harbor—that we'll waken the sleeping Republican giant." By most accounts, the giant was, if not slumbering, then certainly groggy through the 2008 cycle. Now, however, the party has clearly had its road-to-Damascus experience on political tech, complete with its own Saul (Anuzis, the RNC transition co-chair who organized the event). The summit was pitched as an extended bull-session meant to gather ideas for how to overcome the Democratic new-media advantage—and also served as a none-too-subtle casting call for tech consultants hoping to become the Republicans' Trippi or Joe Rospars.

Newly-minted RNC Chair Michael Steele announced the sea change in signally un-conservative terms: the two sure ways to get "kicked off the team," he declared, were to reject an idea because it hadn't been tried before, or to justify a practice on the grounds that "we've always done it this way." Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich—who apparently learned of the summit on Twitter, to which he is a recent convert—had some characteristically big-picture remarks of his own, invoking the revolutionary power of 18th century pamphlets like Common Sense and The Federalist, and touting the potential of many-to-many communications to cultivate a more inclusive politics.

One common theme—dubbed "trickle-up activism" by consultant David All—was the need to build a Republican tech infrastructure that would be shared across candidates and races, in contrast with more narrowly-tailored efforts such as MyBarackObama.com.

It fell to the geeks to delve into the nitty-gritty. One common theme—dubbed "trickle-up activism" by consultant David All—was the need to build a Republican tech infrastructure that would be shared across candidates and races, in contrast with more narrowly-tailored efforts such as MyBarackObama.com. Partisans engaged at one level, or through one affinity group, could be leveraged to support other issues and candidates—while the data gathered about supporters could be aggregated to the benefit of all Republicans running. Cherie Short, who's active with DC's Young Republicans, offered up what one might call a Sally Struthers model of getting young people involved in supporting GOP causes and candidates: sell them on a subscription model of donations that mirrors the familiar online model of automatic bill payments, asking not for a big $500 check, but regular small contributions—the price of a Starbucks latte a day.

As many recognized, though, there's an important asymmetry between the parties when it comes to exploiting all the sexy social tech that gets the lion's share of press: the Republican base isn't on Facebook and Twitter to anything like the same extent as their Democratic counterparts. The activists may be willing to sign up for the sake of the party, but ordinary voters may not. Much of the discussion, therefore, turned to the less flashy, but equally crucial backend tech that makes brick-and-mortar campaigns hum.

One speaker, for example, pitched a proprietary GPS-enabled canvassing technology that would guide volunteers along election-day walking routes, identifying in realtime those who had already gone to the polls. Smaller campaigns in particular, he claimes, could realize swings of as many as 10 percentage points by cutting the time needed for volunteers to walk a 50-house route by half or more through better use of information.

A popular whipping boy for many speakers was the RNC's VoterVault database, which Montana Republican Matt Brainard likened to a juicy porterhouse steak (voter data) served on a filthy trash-can lid. The problem—Brainard and others argued—was that the system was "data centric" rather than "user centric," enabling potentially powerful queries, but without facilitating the kind of targeting local campaigns needed to do. (Which was why, he noted, the higher-level candidates tended to eschew VoterVault and deal directly with the RNC when they needed data breakouts.)

Of course, it's one thing to gather new ideas, and quite another to implement them. But as the event wrapped on Friday afternoon, there was a palpable edge in Anuzis' repeated insistence that party activists—from whom he'd doubtless been getting an earful—"can't complain" that the party isn't opening up and taking steps to remedy their tech failings. RNC leaders seem acutely aware that if they don't show results soon, the base may start looking for an upgrade.